The Judicial Police (PJ) arrested a man in the Greater Lisbon area suspected of having founded Samourai Wallet, a website used to launder criminal wealth, in an operation coordinated by the American authorities (FBI), it was announced today.
In a statement, the PJ explains that Operation Samourai, which took place simultaneously in several countries, included house searches in the Greater Lisbon area and resulted in the arrest of the suspect, an American with an extradition request who was the administrator of a crypto-asset portfolio.
Cryptoassets are digital representations of values or rights that can be transferred and stored electronically. They are based on blockchain, a type of decentralized information recording technology.
According to the PJ, the US citizen is the main suspect in a large-scale money laundering network, which provided various services to its clients in order to launder the proceeds of illegal activities.
The detainee has already been brought before the judicial authority for first questioning and will remain in pre-trial detention pending the extradition process.
Since the beginning of the investigation, “evidence has been collected and shared that links the administrators of the ‘Samourai’ cryptoasset portfolio to money laundering activities,” the PJ explains in the statement.
Of these services, he adds, ‘Whirlpool’ stands out, “a cryptocurrency mixing service that involves potentially identifiable or ‘contaminated’ funds with others, in order to erase the trace and make it impossible to identify the originator, as well as to freeze them by the authorities.”
According to the PJ, more than one billion dollars in bitcoins and more than 680 million dollars in BTC were used in Ricochet transactions, a crypto-asset exchange platform dedicated to developing exclusive solutions that allow users to invest their “crypto-assets” in real time.
Part of the operation was carried out on national territory by the PJ’s National Unit for Combating Cybercrime and Technological Crime, in collaboration with the US Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division (IRS-CI).
The operation involved several house searches and led to the seizure of material goods of undisclosed value and a collection of databases.